


That Thing That's A Bitch

by Vehemently



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-06
Updated: 2013-04-06
Packaged: 2017-12-07 15:54:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/750307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vehemently/pseuds/Vehemently
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What is it: comedy. Or, a horror story. Or a mystery story? Definitely some kind of story.<br/>Tagline: "Well, <i>that</i> was probably bad."</p><p>Takes place at the end of season 2.</p>
            </blockquote>





	That Thing That's A Bitch

Sheppard flew a _spaceship_. In _space_. It went _really fast_ , not like the achingly sincere minivan that was the NASA shuttle. It had rockets in the back, and it was weird how easy it was to fly it -- not in that eager, personable way that puddle-jumpers would hew to his line of thought, but in a dumb mechanical sense. It was just as easy to fly as a Wraith dart. It didn't even bum him out to realize that the 302, like the dart, had been built so any dumb asshole with eyes could fly it. Casualty rates had to be _astronomical_ in space combat, if the designers assumed that years of flight training weren't worth the expense.

It was a _spaceship_ , and it was his. If he were to come home to Atlantis and find a '68 Porsche and a main drag to test her on, he would be able to die happy.

But he didn't have time to play around (dammit), and was right into the middle of things, three more 302s at his heels as they headed from the _Daedalus_ at the twin hives. He still hadn't figured out what had gone bad, just that it had, and his guys were inside, and it was his job to get them out. Nice and simple.

The starfield whirled in his cockpit window, gorgeous cold eternity. The hives were puny against that emptiness, and flyers like gnats smaller still. "Delta Two, on my lead, Get ready to hit their stardrive." Two was a Marine, likely to join the Altantis detachment in another year or so. He felt pretty good about the guy steadying his elbow.

His headset blatted: "I've got incoming," just as his own controls blinked at him, warning.

Four was a kid from the _Daedalus_ permanent crew, good head on his shoulders. He hadn't met Three till they'd been cramming themselves into flight suits side by side, listening to emergency alarms. "Deltas Three and Four, try to keep those darts off our six." They both acknowledged, excitement as high as their voices. They whipped out the attitudinal jets, and ran off some really awesome flying while he and Two shot themselves like poisoned arrows at the hives.

_Daedalus_ was taking fire, behind them, and they all knew it. Sooner than he'd expected (and a lot sooner than he'd hoped), the order came over his headset. "Colonel Sheppard, get your flight back to the ship. We need to jump out of here as soon as possible."

Shit. "Two minutes. I can shut down their hyperdrive." Also known as, don't make me guilt trip you in the middle of live fire about leaving your men behind. He knew Caldwell's soft points by now, and Caldwell knew his hard ones. He wasn't leaving.

_Daedalus_ didn't want to hear it.

Sheppard, and Two at his wing, were close now; they ran a preliminary firing run. They blasted away at the darts and hive ships alike, adrenaline pumping hard. They weren't exactly Shock and Awe, but he could feel himself losing his temper and he knew that scared people. There was some magic phrase to say that would make Caldwell back down, but was kind of too busy to find it right now.

He was coming back around for the shot that might finally cripple one of the hives when a pair of darts came up behind him. "Dammit!" he called, and they were firing. He lost Two, Three, and Four on his display -- maybe they were already heading back to _Daedalus_ , or maybe they were wasting their tiny rescue window on rescuing _him_. He twisted hard, six or eight different vectors, and those damn things were still on him, stinging his electricals. Tail thrust was going to pieces.

Ahead and to his left, some bright flicker -- somebody was about to jump. The hives would be gone and Rodney and Ronon with them. Shit.

One of the darts on his tail scored a good one, frying navigation. He yanked hard, trying to fly this damn thing by sight without losing visual on the hives. These darts were unreal on maneuvers, and they could be, with superhuman pilots who could take a zillion Gs on a tight turn like that. He wondered to himself whether anybody had specced out darts yet, tested their limits, and he thought --

_nothing_

\-- that probably nobody had and he would get to do it himself. Wait.

He wasn't in his spaceship any more.

He was in a gray room with high ceilings and something drunkenly wrong with all the right angles. There was some familiar -- pattern wasn't the right word, but an imprint, some vague recognition that he couldn't tease forward. He was lying on his back and desperately thirsty.

Sheppard lay there a while, just quiet with his eyes open, listening to the clicks of his eyelashes touching when he blinked. All his fingers and toes reported for duty; no salient pain; nothing hot or swollen; but he didn't move. After a little while, he realized that someone else in the room was breathing.

"I'm awake now," he announced.

The breath shifted pitch. Somebody was excited, or afraid.

"I can hear you. What happened? Am I hurt?" He rolled his head to one side, saw nobody, and laboriously rolled it to the other side.

Standing in the corner of the room was a man he knew. Long neck, long narrow body, clipped hair beginning to grow out, nose like a ski jump. He stood there, hands clasped in front of him, the picture of patient administrative suffering. In a greatcoat. In a really strange greatcoat that was really familiar.

"Oh hey," blurted Sheppard. "You're Michael."

"Yes," said Michael, waiting. His -- its? -- attention was on him totally. Waiting for Sheppard to do something. Sheppard flexed experimentally, and sat up.

"I hope you're not still -- bitter." The table he'd been laid on was cold, so he levered himself up immediately to his feet.

"No," said Michael, still standing, hawkish, in the corner. Sheppard peered at him, cracking his neck. His whole body felt -- weird. Like he'd been stretched out in a taffy machine and then poured, molten, back into a Sheppard-shaped mold.

"And, hey, didn't you used to be pale and funnylooking?"

Michael's mouth twitched. "Looks are relative. How are you feeling?" He cocked his head, in a way Sheppard read as arrogant.

"Thirsty." Sheppard thought about it. "Actually, really thirsty."

A weird expression stole over Michael's face, half apprehension and half satisfaction. Well, _that_ was probably bad.

"Would you like something to drink?"

"I'd like to know what happened," Sheppard retorted. He felt up his wrists for handcuff marks, but didn't find anything. In the screwy light the whole room was washed out, gray, and his wrists looked gray too. "Am I a prisoner?"

"No," said Michael. "Of course not." He stepped forward for the first time. Sheppard took a step back without thinking, and then wondered why he had. "We can still be allies," Michael intoned, and that was _all_ satisfaction on his face, now.

This was not helping clear up the confusion. "Sure we can," Sheppard replied, charming, and shook his brains for a memory of why they wouldn't have been able to before. Something was missing, in the bin of recent events, that would explain all this. Sheppard couldn't find it.

"Let's find you a drink," said Michael, all haughty benevolence. He raised his hand, as if to usher Sheppard somewhere, but right then the weirdest thing of all happened: Michael turned into a giant milkshake. It was like a cartoon, a six-and-a-half foot cup with a wiggly straw hanging out the top. It was pretty fucking weird, and Sheppard didn't know what to do. He reached out with one hand and drank till he was full.

When he was done, the thirst was gone, and he felt a little bit more like himself. Michael -- and the milkshake -- was gone. Sheppard stepped over a crumple of greatcoat on the floor, careful to avoid the tiny old man sleeping in it. Strange, that he hadn't noticed any homeless people till now. He opened the door, and walked down the hall, and didn't see anybody he knew.

The halls were all wrong-angled in the same way the room had been, the lights all too pale and everyone pale under them. He couldn't read their expressions -- they went about their business, ignoring him, or else they stared. He stared back till they looked away. Sheppard had been so sure he'd seen every deck of the _Daedalus_ , but absolutely nothing was ringing bells. He wandered.

There was something in the back of his head, something he'd been meaning to do, but it didn't come back to him till he saw them with his own eyes. He was in a room somewhere, full of lunchboxes stacked floor to ceiling. Ronon and Rodney were standing by the wall, wrapped in the weirdest white stuff like they'd fallen into a giant vat of silly string, and Sheppard laughed to see them. Not leaving his men behind, right. In all the weird, he could still grasp at that. "Hey, Ronon, hey Rodney," he said, and raised one hand to greet them --

But Ronon was snarling, inarticulate, shoulders twitching under all that junk. Rodney was still and his eyes were like dinner plates, or hubcaps, or maybe satellite dishes. He didn't say a word.

"Oh, we're on the hive ship," said Sheppard, mostly to himself. "That -- that explains some stuff, I guess."

Ronon spat at him. Rodney clicked his mouth shut, as if he'd forgotten and left it hanging open. Sweat rolled down his forehead and down to one side of the bridge of his nose. Rodney didn't notice.

"So," said Sheppard. He put his hands on his hips. "I'm here to rescue you."

"Make it a fair fight," growled Ronon.

"Things went bad," Sheppard continued, "and _Daedalus_ was taking fire. I made them stay so I could rescue you."

In an instant Rodney did that thing, where he reappeared from some ineffable plane that exists only inside his head (possibly there are dancing girls there, because he always seems delighted to be there and sorry to leave), and his eyes came back down to normal size. He opened his mouth, worked it once or twice, and said,

"John? Yes, you definitely call things _bad_." Sheppard had never really understood the term _poleaxed_ until that very second. Ronon really did look like he'd taken a terrific blow to the head, and was contemplating how life might be with only half a skull. It was kind of -- unnerving.

"Well," said John, still mystified, "Let's get ourselves off the menu first, and worry about intergalactic relations second."

"Easy for you to say," Ronon breathed, staring.

Sheppard ignored that, and got busy tearing at the silly string. "You steal one dart and escape from a Wraith fleet, you've done it a hundred times."

"Escape first," Rodney panted. "Panic later." He wriggled against his bonds, trying to break free.

Sheppard moved to help, and Rodney squirmed away from his touch. Not in a squealy, _Eeeek, a mouse!_ way, but like Sheppard was covered with something disgusting, like blueberry yogurt or snot.

"Panic later," repeated Sheppard, and broke off the last of the silly string. Ronon stood there, shaking all over, and Rodney was rubbing his arms as if he were cold. "Ready? Okay, let's go."

They went.


End file.
